Thursday, April 28, 2005

That's John Fushaanoo, tonight on BBC2...

Question Time tonight, unfortunately not from Wembley Stadium, with all three leaders having a 30 minute slot, should be quite interesting. Watch out for any bulges in the back.

Also, here, you can get your very own virtual Peter Snow who will pop up at irregular interviews and tell you the news. Like a Microsoft Office Paperclip except a lot more useful and less irritating.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

With a few flippant clicks of my mouse, democracy is senselessly butchered at my hands...

Who Should You Vote For?

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Keep-Illegal-Dolphins-Out-Of-Our-Cities Party


Your actual outcome:



Labour -2
Conservative -5
Liberal Democrat 27
UK Independence Party -4
Green 36


You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Mmm, considering the above results, and that the public whip election quiz told me I should vote Conservative, I have demonstrated that either:

a) "issues" are overrated, and should not be used to decide where I put my cross.

b) the internet is overrated, and should not be used to decide where I put my cross.

c) I should've thought ahead so that I could be putting the cross by my own name.

Considering there is probably some truth in a and b, and c is too ghastly a thought for anybody to bear thinking about, looks like I'm going to have to go on the typical things like personality or my favourite colour (which at least for the purposes of this discussion is not green or blue).

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Question Time...

...saw about 25 mins of last night's edition and found it just depressing. I switched on part way through a question that seemed to be about how John Paul II would be remembered. David Blunkett gave a horrific answer about there not being moral absolutes, and against my expectations Petrina Holdsworth (chairman of UKIP - a nice bit of anti-PCness in her job title) was pretty good, and Michael Ancram was generally very good, saying that he wanted our spiritual leaders to place truth above modernisation. But what was really depressing was the audience. Now, I don't think I do agree with the pope's views on contraception, and obviously unprotected sex is only one of a number of means of HIV/AIDS transmission but when Ancram mentioned safe sex not just being about contraception, and pointed out that the pope had been a strong campaigner against the world's failure to provide treatment to AIDS sufferers in the developing world, one woman turned on him and angrily asked him what he could possibly mean by safe sex if not contraception? I couldn't believe it. The one thing that people were unable to admit was that we as species have failed. There was a lot of talk about being progressive, which in many ways is a good idea, but people use the word as if humanity, after however many thousands of years of making a mess of our lives and our world, is just around the corner from getting it right and solving all the problems that we've got ourselves into. I know that this word is not part of the modern frame of reference, but sin is destructive, and in many cases the people who suffer are not the ones who are guilty of the particular sin. So people are often passed HIV through no fault of their own, but as humanity we've cocked up and we're all responsible. We demand our freedom to do what we want and then wash our hands of any guilt for what happens afterwards. As Edith Schaeffer wisely pointed out, we do have freedom of choice, but we don't have the freedom to choose the consequences of our choices. It's funny, Romans 1 has always seemed quite harsh to me until last night, but now it makes a little more sense - professing to be wise we have become fools, and God having told us a better way, has continually accepted our demands for freedom to do what we want and has "given us over to a depraved mind". And we just continue to portray Him as the bad guy.